Names, brands, writing, and the language of commerce.

January 21, 2019

I usually wait for at least three sightings of a phenomenon to declare a trend. But in the case of gambit, I decided that two big, unrelated occurrences within a single week were sufficient. They were certainly enough to start me scurrying down multiple rabbit holes, etymological and cultural.

January 15, 2019

The longest government shutdown in U.S. history began on December 22, 2018, when Congress and the White House failed to break an impasse over a spending bill. It is now in its fourth week. An estimated 800,000 federal employees are either working without pay – as in the case of thousands of TSA workers at the nation’s airports – or furloughed: sent home, deprived of paychecks, and forbidden to do any kind of work on behalf of the government. “Furloughed employees have no automatic right to payment,” Eric Reed wrotein The Street on January 14; “however, historically Congress has paid all federal workers for the time they lost during a shutdown.”

This use of furlough to describe an involuntary, uncertain work suspension isn’t new – the OED’s earliest citation is from 1867, in the Bangor (Maine) Daily Whig & Courier – but it isn’t the original sense of the word. And it’s distinctly American.

January 07, 2019

At the American Dialect Society’s annual Word of the Year vote, held Friday, January 4 in New York City, the overall winner was tender-age shelter. (Here’s my column about tender-age shelter for the Visual Thesaurus; subscription required for full access.) The runner-up word, yeet, was less topical and less transparent, especially if you’re older than, say, 19. I keep a running list of potential words of the year, and yeet — which was voted the Slang/Informal Word of the Year for 2018, and which won the first-round vote for overall WOTY — had completely escaped my attention. So I looked into it.

November 26, 2018

“This is, without a doubt, the most uninformed, toady, poorly written, categorically untrue statement I have ever seen a President of the United States make.” That’s what reporter Robin Wright said Joe Cirincione, a nuclear-security expert and president of Ploughshares Fund, had told her for a story published November 20 in the online edition of the New Yorker. Had she misheard? Surely Cirincione had said “toadying,” the adjective that means “in an obsequious manner”?

But no: the quote in fact reproduced a tweet Cirincione had posted earlier that day.

This is, without a doubt, the most uninformed, imbecilic, toady, poorly-written, categorically untrue statement I have ever seen from a president of the United States. A complete disgrace. https://t.co/9eqoWFeroX

Toady is a word with a colorful past, about which more in a bit. It’s a noun (“servile parasite,” “fawning flatterer”) or a verb (“to behave like a toady”), but not a modifier. Not any longer, that is.

The Toadies in Super Mario World are neither sycophantic humans nor toads; they resemble a cross between Harry Potter and a high school’s eagle mascot. Source: Mariowiki.

November 12, 2018

In the lead-up to last week’s midterm elections, a friend of mine was sending as many as 1,500 texts a day to likely voters in swing districts: areas that had a better than 50 percent chance of switching from Republican to Democrat. I was hugely impressed until I read about Oliver Butler, a New York theater director who teaches a class on text activism, or textavism. “On a good day,” wrote Anna Russell in “The Rules of Textavism,” in the November 12 issue of the New Yorker, “Butler will send nearly three thousand texts; on an exceptional day, he will send ten thousand.” Recently, wrote Russell, “in the course of twenty-four hours, texters from MoveOn, where Butler volunteers, sent more than two million messages urging registered Democrats to vote in November.”

Oliver Butler’s Twitter avatar. His bio describes him as a “Theater Director and Hat Baron.”

October 15, 2018

Democrats “have gone loco, they have gone loco,” President Trump told a crowd in Tennessee on October 1. He added, for the benefit of monolingual listeners: “They have gone crazy.” Earlier that day, at a White House press conference, he had used the same word to disparage another group on his enemies list:

“They’re loco,” he said of the media. “I use that word because of that fact that we made a trade deal with Mexico.”

Two days earlier, Trump had tested “loco” at a West Virginia rally, saying the Democratic Party was “so far left, Pocohantas” – his often-invoked slur for Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren – “is considered conservative.” The Democrats “have gone crazy. They’ve gone loco.”

And on October 10 Trump wielded his new favorite adjective against the Federal Reserve Bank.

His full comment, in an interview with Fox News: “The Fed is going wild. I mean, I don’t know what their problem is that they are raising interest rates and it’s ridiculous. The Fed is going loco, and there’s no reason for them to do it. I’m not happy about it.”

Faster than a speeding locomotive, reporters were turning “loco” against its source. “Donald Trump’s Loco Attack on the Federal Reserve” was the headline on an article by staff writer John Cassidy in the New Yorker online. (Cassidy’s conclusion: “Rather than acting strategically and respecting an institutional setup that, generally speaking, has served the country well, [Trump] went loco.”) Washington Post opinion writer Catherine Rampell observed that “Trump’s arm-twisting of the Fed is what’s truly ‘loco’.”

That’s a lot of “loco” for a single fortnight, and the reasons for its sudden surge are unclear. Trump often has trouble stringing together a coherent sentence in his native English, and he has no history of demonstrating admiration for the Spanish language or its speakers. (In the only other example I can recall of his using Spanish, he called for deporting “bad hombres” during an October 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton. He mispronounced “hombres” as “hambres,” which means “hungers.”) Is Trump a fan of Marcelo “El Loco” Bialsa, the Argentine-born soccer coach now managing Leeds United? Doubtful. Was the recent Spanish incursion was influenced by “Loco,” a new track by Machine Gun Kelly released in August of this year?

September 28, 2018

Have you ever noticed a certain word a couple of times within a short period of time, and then started seeing it everywhere? The Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky calls this the frequency illusion*, and I was afflicted by it last week. The word I kept seeing was stunt, the noun, and the more I looked into it the more it seemed to multiply. What was particularly striking was how it was implemented across the political spectrum to comment on recent events. I even discovered a new-to-me slang definition of the verb to stunt.

The Stunt Man (1980). Delightful movie. Its Spanish title, by the way, is El Especialista.

August 27, 2018

This was the front page of the New York Daily News on August 22, 2018:

“All the President’s Henchmen”

The line puts a spin on the title of the most famous book (and movie) to come out of the Watergate scandal, which broke 45 years ago this month.

All the President’s Men (1974)

And that title was inspired by Robert Penn Warren’s political novel All the King’s Men, which won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1947 and was made into a 1949 movie starring Broderick Crawford (which won the Best Picture Oscar) and a 2006 movie starring Sean Penn (which has a miserable 11% rating on Rotten Tomatoes).

August 20, 2018

On Friday, August 17, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported that a case of measles had been confirmed in “a non-resident tourist” who had visited six Santa Monica businesses within a three-day period earlier in the month. No details about the tourist were provided, but at least two of the restaurants he or she visited – Ivy’s at the Beach and Chez Jay – are considered “celebrity hangouts,” with pricey menus that have no options for children. That could suggest that the person is an adult, even though measles – a highly contagious viral infection spread by coughing or sneezing – is commonly considered a disease of childhood.

That is, it used to be a common disease of childhood, one that afflicted hundreds of thousands of children in the United States every year, and killed as many as 30 percent of them, usually from complications such as measles pneumonia. Measles can also cause blindness, mental retardation, and – in children born to mothers who contract the disease – permanent deafness. Overall, the risks are much greater for infected adults than for children, but it’s no picnic for kids, either. (Keep reading.)